The Docker Engine and dockerfiles have helped usher in a new container revolution in how applications are packaged and run. Now as container workloads increasingly enter into full-scale production deployments, the challenge is around scale-out and management.

With Docker 1.12, Docker first integrated its Swarm clustering engine and now the new InfraKit toolkit will help scale-out efforts even further.

The InfraKit effort was originally developed under the name "libmachete" on GitHub, but was renamed a week ago, ahead of the project becoming open-source and being officially announced by Hykes.

"InfraKit is a toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure," the project's GitHub page explains. "It breaks infrastructure automation down into simple, pluggable components. These components work together to actively ensure the infrastructure state matches the user's specifications."

InfraKit is a tool to help organize infrastructure much like the way containers help to organize applications into micro-services.

InfraKit Groups, Instances and Flavors

From a technical perspective, InfraKit consists of a set of plugins for specific pieces of infrastructure that provide an active controller looking at system and service state.

The plugins all communicate over HTTP and can be organized as groups, instances or flavors. Groups are a collection of individual instances while Flavors are used to differentiate one group from another.

"By separating provisioning of physical instances and configuration of applications into Instance and Flavor plugins, application vendors can directly develop a Flavor plugin -- for example, MySQL -- that can work with a wide array of instance plugins," Docker explains in an engineering blog post.

What is particularly innovative about InfraKit isn't the organization of infrastructure, but rather the ability to self-heal infrastructure that deviates from policy.

"The InfraKit plugins themselves continuously monitor at the group, instance and flavor level for any drift in configuration and automatically correct it without any manual intervention," Docker stated.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist